The name "Baidu"

by John Pasden

02 Aug 2005

I recently read a Yahoo News article titled “Baidu.com Ready for Stock Market Debut.” I read the story only partly interested until I got to the part about how the name “Baidu” (百度) was chosen. Literally, it means “100 degrees,” so I figured the logic behind the name was akin to the logic behind the name “Yahoo 360.” You know, something about connections… about connecting you to the information you’re looking for. I was quite wrong.

> 李彦宏: The name “Baidu” is actually related to searching. Back in the second half of ’99 before the National Day festivities I was thinking about making something — about making a Chinese search engine — and I needed a name for it. I set a few conditions for myself: The first was that the domain name should be short. The second was that it had a definite connection with searching. The third was that it couldn’t be too obvious. It couldn’t have a word like “search” or “seek” in the name; it should be a bit subtler. The fourth was that Chinese people could understand it. It needn’t be an English word that Americans would understand; rather, being a Chinese language search engine, it should be understandable to Chinese people. It was actually taken from a poem by Xin Qiji (辛弃疾): “众里寻她千百度” [something like “searching for her desperately in the crowd” (?)].

I’m not good at translating, and I’m especially unqualified to translate Chinese poetry. But I believe in this usage 度 is simply used to express a degree of intensity. Together with 百, it expresses a high degree of intensity. I, rightly or wrongly, translated it above as “desperately.” I’m not sure how close I am.

For more context, here is the original poem it came from:

> 青玉案

> 东风夜放花千树，更吹落、星如雨。
> 宝马雕车香满路。
> 凤箫声动，玉壶光转，一夜鱼龙舞。

> 蛾儿雪柳黄金缕，笑语盈盈暗香去。
> 众里寻他千百度。
> 蓦然回首，那人却在，灯火阑珊处。

I can understand most of the poem without much difficulty, but again, I’m no translator, so I don’t want to touch it. I can confirm what Yahoo says, though. It “refers to a man ardently searching for his lover in a festival crowd.” If someone else wants to offer a translation, that would be nice. (Here’s a spoiler, though: in the last line, he finds her.)

Another interesting part of the article was this line: “Baidu.com’s advertising notes that Chinese has 38 ways to say ‘I.'” Huh? 38?! I wanted to factcheck this, so I did some searches. A lot of searches. Using Baidu as well as Google. I couldn’t find that claim anywhere. All I found was a Peking University BBS thread on the word “I” in various Chinese dialects.

Then I turned to Wenlin, my dictionary program. To my surprise, it listed 35! Not all of them are commonly used (or commonly used to mean “I”), but I guess that’s a start. In case you’re wondering, they are:

众里寻她千百度 is translated in A Silver Treasury of Chinese Lyrics as “Restlessly I searched among the crowds.” I don’t see any reason why we can’t be more literal and just say, “In the crowds I sought her, a million times.” To 寻 someone 千百度-ly may connote the emotion but it denotes only the number of times. I didn’t look this up, but it doesn’t look like it needs to be.

Some of those first-person appellations need to be qualified. E.g., 妾, as far as I know, is only used in literary Chinese as a self-deprecating way for a woman to refer to herself when addressing her husband, lit. “your concubine.” 賤妾 is just saying “your lowly concubine.” A list of words that mean “I” as a first person pronoun would be shorter. But CHinese uses descriptive appellations more often than English, which tends to use pronouns more (a parallel kind of thing happens in Japanese when we say “John-san wa . . .” rather than “you” or “me”), so if you look at it that way there would be lots.

寡人 is another appelation not in your list, used by rulers (“I, [the lonely person]”). 吾,予, and 余 are all common in Classical Chinese, and they actually mean “I”; not “your little son-in-law” or anything. In fact 吾 can’t even be used as an object. By the way, 餘 is not the traditional form for 余 as 1st person pronoun, except in some rare exceptions.

I heard Wen Lin has a lot of words, so I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to have obsolete or formal words. Even my cheap old 汉英词典, a modern dictionary, has my examples. Did you limit your search to words in modern dialects, John? Or does Wen Lin really omit them?
–Allen

Some of these a genuine first-person pronouns, albeit with varying usage. Many others are ways of referring to oneself which can replace “I” in a sentence (“brother”, “lowly person”, “member of younger generation”, etc). As Allen notes, this type of usage is very uncommon in English (and not very common in modern Chinese either, as a matter of fact). So as for how many ways there are to say “I” in English, I would guess not much more than we might think at first. How many can you think of? “Yours truly”, the royal “we”, anything else?

洒家- originally used by buddhist monks
小婿-is used by the son-in-law when talking to, well, his in-laws
朕/孤- is only used by the emperor
臣- is used by the ministers and officials when talking to the emperor
下官- is used by officials when addressing someone has a higher rank

“100 times” sort of doesn’t make sense to me, though. If you’re searching for someone continuously, how is it divided into “times”? It’s not like you gave up and went home 99 times already. (I realize it’s hyperbole, but bear with me. I’m talking about the logic of it.)

Or is he not searching continuously? Is he just sort of looking around every now and then?

Can we set one picture for each of us too? hahahaha…
well, 众里寻她千百度 is likely to say he does not give up searching. Contrasted to 那人却在,灯火阑珊处, the author wanted to show that continuous hard working will finally lead to the success, but one more thing you need, the key – 蓦然回首, it’s kinda like Enlightenment (悟) in Buddhism.

my understanding of this poem is:
you sometimes try so hard to find ‘her’ in the obvious place , all of sudden, ‘she’ appears from nowhere, from least expected place.( but it was the result of the hard searching.)

Actually, you can with Gravatar Kastner, but John would have to implement it on his end. I just have to say I am awed by the level of Chinese language profiency on this blog. Do you all happen to be linguists?

I think the poem is very good but I wouldn’t appreciate it to be used as a name of a search engine. what is more, the Baidu search engine is kind of crap! The connection is so weak and using it on a search engine, which kind of ruin the ‘feeling’ of this poem.

Here is a translation of the poem, translated by Irving Y. Lo, in the anthology “Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry,” edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo.

Tune: “Green Jade Cup”
Lantern Festival

One night’s east wind made a thousand trees burst into flower;
And breathe down still more
Showers of fallen stars.*
Splendid horses, carved carriages, fragrance filled the road.
Music resounds from paired flutes,
Light swirled on water-clock towers.
All night long, the fabled fish-dragons danced. **
Gold-threaded jacket, moth- or willow-shaped hair ornaments
Melted into the throng, giggling, a trail of scent.
In the crowd, I looked for her a thousand and one times;
And all at once, when I turned my head,
I was startled to find her
Among the lanterns where candles were growing dim.

“…it is recorded that from the numerous stages erected along the street, lanterns were hung from bamboo poles and ‘far and near, high and low, they appeared like flying stars.'”

** “[The fish-dragon dance] is identified as a dance imported from Central Asia… . ‘Yu-lung'[The fish-dragon] was said to be an exotic animal from She-li, which first played in the courtyard, then jumped into water to become a paired-eye fish, and finally emerged as a yellow dragon eighty feet long.”